WORTH NOTING; Following the Market Is Not an Exact Science

In October, Shirley M. Tilghman, the president of Princeton, was named to the board of Google, perhaps the hottest company on the Nasdaq in a while.

As compensation, Ms. Tilghman was awarded 6,000 shares of company stock over five years, a fairly standard amount for a director. At the time, however, each share of Google was worth about $300, many times more than, say, a share of Ford (about $10) or even Microsoft (about $27), so her worth on paper was nearly $2 million.

Because of her compensation agreement, Ms. Tilghman cannot sell her shares. In the meantime, the value of the shares rose to a high of $475 in early January, which meant that she had a potential $2.85 million. But in recent weeks, Google's stock has nosedived back to the mid-300's, in effect costing her a potential $800,000 or so.

Ms. Tilghman, a scientist by training, primarily in molecular biology, and one of academia's biggest advocates of getting young women involved in the sciences, is sanguine about her loss.

"Given that my motivation for joining the Google board had nothing to do with compensation," she said in an e-mail message last week, "I am not personally focused on the fluctuations in the value of the stock. I am much more interested in the long term health and vitality of the company."